Blogoir: April

How far should what people did back in February 1970 fairly be taken into account now? And by whom?

Another story from those distant days makes an interesting contrast.

At an FCO Leadership event in 2006, a presentation on Globalisation argued that we were now beholding one of the most momentous changes in human history roll out before our very eyes: the addition in only a decade or so of a billion new people to the global jobs market-place.

The result (it was said) as India and China and some others started to use IT on a vast scale would be dramatic for Western wage levels.

We had grown used to the idea that wages and living standards would edge up. But why should they, if any employer could call on the skills of so many smart people round the globe prepared to work for the same - or much less?

This in turn gave many governments a huge problem: how to pay for social services as the numbers of those seeking them drifted up but the number of people paying for them (and the money paid into the pot) trended down?

One answer of course is that this development is in fact a stunning opportunity to reduce government in its cumbersomely unsustainable Industrial Age form. Mainly because there is no choice.

Be that as it may, have a look at PeoplePerHour.com, a superbly simple way to find people not to do Jobs but to perform ad hoc tasks at the pay rate selected by the 'service buyer''.

Anyone round the world can join. If you or your business want an article or piece of software written or some research done, simply post the requirement and indicative remuneration. Offers - and prices - will come in soon from potential providers.

This site allows those seeking a hired hand to define to a fine degree the specification of the task in hand, and so reduce significantly the costs/overheads and hassle of employing someone even part-time. But the provider too gets a say in negotiating the deal and the price. Elegant, efficient and fair.

By the way, I yesterday signed up as a Provider. Why not? Two small job proposals have arrived by email in the first 24 hours. I have responded to one. A brisk start.

Outsourcing on steroids. Welcome to something close to a truly free labour and creativity market. The future way hundreds of millions of people will be working?

Imagine. The End of Management?

Every now and then one sees something ... Unusual.

Such as, via Jay Nordlinger, the striking spectacle of former UK Cabinet Minister Clare Short seemingly relishing the day when her former boss PM Tony Blair will fall into the hands of 'brave lawyers' - and be put on trial by the International Criminal Court.

More on EU Foreign Policy.

What is a 'foreign policy'? Let's assume that, crudely speaking, it is something like this:

What Country A (maybe in partnership with countries B, C etc) does to get another country to do things it otherwise might not do on its own, either because that outcome is in Country A's interests or for some wider interest.

Suppose Country A wants Country B to do x. How to set about it?

The main option is simple persuasion, A talking to B as a sort of equal partner to bring B round to A's point of view.

Since usually no country likes to be seen to be 'persuaded' (as it implies that it was too dopey to think of doing x without outside intervention), such discussions are best pursued discreetly. The more so if A is much bigger than B - B's leaders will be sensitive to domestic accusations that they have been patronised or even rolled over and bullied.

If persuasion gets nowhere, A is back to that old diplomatic favourite "carrots and sticks" (or, as the Russians endearingly say, "biscuit and whip").

Using this approach A openly uses positive (Bribes) and negative Pain/Cost inducements to change B's perception of the balance of B's self-interest.

This is psychologically a totally different situation.

NB just how different:

• Here A has given up pretending to be B's equal partner.
• B knows that A is pushing B explicitly towards a certain outcome.
• Even if B thinks that outcome is maybe OK, B now has an incentive to inflict Pain/Cost on A or just be awkward, to raise the price A pays for getting B to move.

Plus:

• Central to how this works out in practice are the underlying (and often unanalysed) assumptions each side has about the other's state of mind and capacity to move, the credibility of the carrots/sticks proffered, and each side's sheer determination/stubbornness.
• Bluff and double-bluff come full into play.

The typical 'carrot and stick' situation is the donkey which won't move. Offer it a bribe to move in the direction you want? Or whup its butt?

What if your carrot is too measly, or your stick too flimsy to hurt? What if unbeknown to you the donkey is too sick/tired to move?

Your tactics appear logical in themselves, but your tools are ineffective and/or being applied to a creature unable to respond to them.

But in this scenario one thing looks clear. If the donkey starts to move in the wrong direction, no carrot should be offered to try to get him back on track. This incentivises the donkey always to move in the wrong direction, not the right one.

All of which brings us to EU policy in the Balkans.

Yesterday the EU and Serbia signed a Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with Serbia, a significant institutional step towards Serbia's eventual full EU membership. This move has been made to boost the chances of the 'pro-European' tendency in Serbia's forthcoming elections.

But there is some small print. The SAA will not be ratified or Serbia given advantages under it until Belgrade is deemed to be fully cooperating with the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) to help bring key war crimes suspects (viz Karadzic and Mladic) to justice.

The EU has had years to make this move since Milosevic fell. The best time to do it would have been in 2001 immediately after Milosevic was transferred to the Hague to international acclaim.

Making the EU play then would have helped generate a sense of Serbia's irrestible momentum towards Western standards, enabling the Mladic and Karadzic problem to be managed in the context of shared growing success, rather than in what we see years later, namely unending 'pressure' and bad temper.

But the EU held back, hoping in effect that the mere prospect of Serbia joining the verdant European uplands would suffice to induce full ICTY cooperation.

Some EU governments including HMG took the hawkish view that having handed over Milosevic, Serbia should and could promptly finish the job and hand over Messrs K and M. If not, let the Serbs decay until they themselves grasped the need to 'grow up'. (Note: some Serb ultra-democrats themselves take this view, insisting that only a crash into a hard wall of reality will bring the Serbian people finally to their senses about their true role in the great scheme of things).

That approach had the virue of being Tough and Clear. But was it Wise? After all these years are the Bosnia/Kosovo/Serbia problems (and all the EU funds poured into the area) really being handled as deftly and creatively as they might be?

Not clear, putting it politely. Oh, and K and M are still not arrested.

For now, will the EU's SAA carrot succeed in getting Serbia to move purposefully in the direction the EU wants?

Serbia's acting Prime Minister Kostunica is sneering at this latest development, saying that Serbia is not going to be bribed to hand over Kosovo for this. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has said (not unreasonably) that a lot of issues in the region would have been easier had the EU move been made much earlier.

Better late than never?

Or has the EU given Serbia's moderates a sizeable but in fact fairly hollow and patronising carrot?

Has this gesture been made not because Serbia is nervous - but because the EU is?

As (I think) Chris Patten used to say about this part of the world, "the worst outcome is that they pretend to move towards EU integration, and we pretend to believe them..."

A new consensus is emerging. 

Biofuels are Bad. Not that long ago they were Good.

As Mark Steyn puts it:

On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized: “The production of biofuel is devastating huge swathes of the world’s environment. So why on earth is the Government forcing us to use more of it?”

You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:

At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies... This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol…

The argument now goes that the massive (and massively subsidised) production of biofuels in the USA is distorting world markets and forcing up food prices round the planet.

But according to Robert Zubrin this is not the case. Instead:

... the ethanol program has actually stimulated corn production so much that, after the part used for ethanol is taken away, the net US corn harvest available for food and feed is up 34% since 2002. Furthermore, contrary to claims in many articles, this has not been done at the expense of soy or wheat production. In fact, U.S. soy plantings this year are expected to be up 18% to a near record of 75 million acres, wheat plantings are up 6%, and overall, US farm exports are up 23%.

Hmm.

Is any part of the wave of criticism against biofuels being whipped up by those who profit from the world's current addiction to oil reserves controlled by non-democratic regimes?

Just asking.

This Quote of the Day at the Adam Smith Institute blog caught my eye:

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission ...

A few years back when we were still in Warsaw we needed a UK base near our boys' school for quick visits, so we bought a flat. Imagine our surprise on moving in when waiting for us on the doormat were disagreeable and menacing communications from the TV licensing people.

One of these documents warned in vivid terms about the risk of prosecution for non-payers. It included a diagram of a 'typical courtroom' complete with the places allocated to the Judge, the Prosecution, the Defendant and so on.

The intention was obvious. To scare people in a primitive way.

As we did not intend to use a TV for watching live TV programmes at that property, I wrote back asking why the licensing authority had engaged a design team too crass to be used even in Ceausescu's Romania.

They did not even have the courtesy to reply.

CrazySquirrel too has been battling with these odious people.

What has happened to public life which allows public authorities in the UK even to think that they can behave in this way, let alone actually do it?

Are we now ... inverted? If not, how would we tell if we were close to being so?

Update: First they came after me and CrazySquirrel. Now they are persecuting John Redwood.

Memo to next government: abolish all TV licensing collection bodies, and let those people who want to pay the TV poll tax do so at their leisure.

Back in 2001 when I had been Ambassador in Belgrade for only a few weeks not long after the fall of Milosevic, I was asked to give oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons.

Here it is. It reads pretty well now as a summary of the manifold issues at the time, even if I was too optimistic about the results of the energy and purpose being projected by the new Serbian leadership.

My analysis on managing the Montenegro independence issue ("convincing process, convincing result") was spot-on. And I think that I got the Kosovo issue right too:

Fundamentally it does not matter whether you call Kosovo "independent", a "confederation" a "Hong Kong variation" or a "pineapple", the point is that either there is a strategic attempt by Serbians, Albanians, and to a degree Macedonians, to agree that this has to be sorted out nicely, peaceably and to some degree with European support, or there is not. 

And this:

If you were the Albanians in Kosovo and were asked "would you like to have a Greater Kosovo everything else being equal?" you would probably say yes. Is it something they think they are ever going to get, it is hard to say ...

There has always been an issue down there as to whether or not we are talking Greater Kosovo or Greater Albania. These groups exist and we know they exist. It is one thing even if they exist pursuing these objectives politically, it is another thing using what you might call ethnic cleansing and murder to accomplish them ...

If people want to talk about a Greater Kosovo or a Greater Serbia or a Greater anything, let them talk, the main thing is they should not fight about it and try to use revolutionary violence ... to accomplish their objectives.

Giving evidence to a House of Commons Committee is not easy, insofar as there is no way to practise before the event. British MPs ask tough, blunt questions. But my contribution won some praise in the Committee's eventual Report.

I did rather better than the then Europe Minister Keith Vaz, who was roundly told off by the Committee:

We find it deeply regrettable that Mr Vaz, the FCO minister responsible for south-east Europe, has not visited the area ... His evidence session with us did not reveal a detailed grasp of the policy issues which the area faces. As the Minister told us, and we know ourselves, the situation in the Balkans is "very complex and very difficult"...

It has to be said that the Committee had a point.

Mr Vaz's eloquent but somewhat insubstantial replies to their many questions were a truly fine example of talking a lot and saying  ... nothing.

Does it matter if Europe's population declines faster than in other regions? If it does matter, why does it matter?

Here is a neat summary of a few of the issues. I like this line:

I can't shake the idea that the demographic projections are a civilization-wide vote of no confidence. It's one thing to lose your population to war, famine or plague. It's quite another to do so out of boredom and despair.

I once drafted a speech for Sir Geoffrey Howe on Population issues. In researching it I hit upon the following Thought.

Take an African country where the population is growing quite quickly - lots of youngsters everywhere. The government there is worried and decides to try to stabilise the nation's demographic trends. It passes a law which says that from that day onwards no couple may have more than two children (those couples already having more than two may keep them).

If that law is 100% respected from Day One, when does the population stop growing?

When I put this simple question to people most stare blankly. Maths! Some say that it stops immediately. Others say more vaguely "maybe in 40 years or so?".

The answer is obvious, once you know it.

Leaving aside immigration/emigration factors, a nation's population grows because more people are being born than are dying. In a country where the population is growing fast, lots more people are being born than are dying.

So, the stability brought about by the new law starts to take effect when the children born the day after the new law comes into effect die of old age, ie in some seventy years' time.

Thus population growth builds up Momentum which rumbles through decades or even centuries.

But likewise population decline builds up hard-to-stop momentum. With fewer children around the numbers of people in retirement grows much faster than the number of people working to support them. Hence Europe and Russia and Japan trundle inexorably towards a very difficult future.

Alas for Europe, our leaders see all this but will not open a serious public debate on it for fear of a massive row with the sprawling 'social' establishment: how dare these leaders - almost all white men - urge women to have more babies? Omigod, they'll be trying to stop abortion next!

Of course, those views will slowly but surely become extinct too.

EU Referendum’s thoughts on why a ‘European Foreign Policy’ is not good idea got me thinking.

What actually is ‘Foreign Policy’ anyway? Could the EU in fact be good at some aspects of it but not all? What are the pros and cons for the UK of ‘More Europe’ in the foreign policy area?

Gooooogle ‘EU foreign policy’ and a lot of dull stuff appears, not least all sorts of academic books talking dully about the EU and Foreign Policy. See eg this. And this and this.

One also comes across distinguished former practitioners making the More Europe case. See eg Lord Hannay, one of the smartest diplomats of our times on why an EU foreign policy is a Necessity, not an Optional Extra.

I find these productions unconvincing. Why? Because they are pitching the arguments on a level of generality which suits the case they want to make, constructing all sorts of clever institutional mechanisms without first really looking hard at what an EU Foreign Policy might actually want to achieve and only then considering how best to achieve it.

Diplomacy is not a matter of structures and resources, although they help cope with a lot of routine and quite important stuff.  The real problem is at the sharp end, dealing with dangerous issues and dangerous people.

That requires a subtle, powerful – even risky – approach, with people and resources geared accordingly.

Anyway.

One part of foreign policy, perhaps even the nub of it, is projecting to others beyond your own borders a clear statement of what you are and what you want. In this, symbols matter.

As I wrote back in 2005 in a searching analysis (which won some Ministerial approval!) of what the UK should do to help sort out the EU following the French/Dutch referenda defeats:

The website Biased BBC brings together people dissatisfied with tendentious or evidently slanted BBC reporting and analysis.

I have had my own moments of supreme dissatisfaction with poor BBC work, so I share their pain.

See especially this, when the BBC got it 100% damagingly wrong at the height of a huge story.

But bias is one thing - slanting consciously or otherwise a story in favour of one political viewpoint (almost always a 'progressive' one, of course).

Ineptitude is something else - a slant emerges from technically and professionally poor work by the reporting team.

This happens a lot for one very good and little understood reason.

The BBC like other media organisations to save money has fused the quite different tasks of Reporting Facts, Analysing Facts and Commenting on Facts into one person on the spot.

This of course suits the egos of the reporters. They no longer have to send back merely dry, balanced accounts of what is happening.

They can opine on those subjects too! See the hi-octane rubbish talked by BBC (and other) reporters embedded with troops when Iraq was invaded - it was astounding how much these over-excited people knew about the conduct of war when enclosed in a military personnel carrier trundling across sand in the middle of nowhere.

And lo, the more dramatically (if dishonestly) they opine, the more impact the report has as 'real' and ''punchy' - maybe even 'controversial' if the words pour out well. 

But NB too a tendency also to trivialise things, to make a facile but seemingly meaningful statement.

The BBC World front page on the BBC website has a 'Have Your Say' facility, where global members of the public can bung in a view on currently hot topics. And the BBC lifts a sentence from one of these to appear on the front page itself.

This week the comment from one Richard in Montpon, France has been left standing for several days for the edification of the planet. Richard warns us about the world's food problems: "I fear we are on the threshold of a bigger food crisis than we might imagine".

Eeek.

Except that we aren't.

The fact that as of this morning far more people have far more food than ever in world history does not count? Maybe Richard does not recall the 1960s/1970s when there was 'triage' talk of letting Bangladesh starve itself into oblivion, on the grounds that it was so badly run that nothing could be done to save it, and food aid was effectively wasted there. We are very far from that point.

Why has Richard's not very profound comment been left up for so long? Why not use the rather better if rather longer observation from Lee in the UK on food problems: The main reason for this is the growing world population and the fact that millions are being lifted out of poverty in countries like China and India.

Lee is right. Current food problems are a function not of failure but of global success which has been spoiled by all sorts of government meddling.

By leaving up for days on end Richard's empty gloomy warning to be seen by millions of people, the BBC dumbs down the issue.

Biased, Inept or Facile?

They report. You decide.

Returning to the history of those 2005 EU Budget negotiations.

It was clear from the outset to anyone in the know (a) that there would be an increased EU budget, and (b) that those who Give and not those who Get would determine just how much bigger.

Since the large number of EU member states wanting to Get were in a relatively weak position, they had to make a vast amount of noise to try to intimidate those who Give into being more generous.

Among the Getters, Poland was well placed in a ‘fairness’ sense. It was a new member state, a large new member state, and (unlike eg Spain/Italy) had not benefited from EU largesse on a massive scale previously. So if any country was to do well in relative and absolute terms, it should be Poland.

The UK position was … complicated.

This time round, following the French/Dutch referenda fiasco Prime Minister Blair had a uniquely favourable position to give the EU a firm dose of UK leadership. Would the EU now lying gasping on the floor be grateful and penitent when we pulled it back on its feet? Or would it gracelessly, greedily try to pick our pocket as we hauled away?

On the substance:

• We did not want to see an inordinate increase in the total EU Budget, as much of the money would be wasted in CAP payments to wealthy farmers, plus UK taxpayers would be paying a large slice of any increase.
• We did want to see the new member states do well – much better to invest EU funds in countries which were relatively poor than absolutely rich.
• But we had the Presidency. This was good, because it enabled us to set the overall agenda and drive the process – and indeed end it, if things were going badly wrong.
• But it also was bad, because the Presidency must play its own national hand and represent the EU as a whole in finding Compromises and Consensus. Plus every Presidency wants to be Successful.
• NB too that we were bound to be attacked flat-out on the UK Rebate issue by everyone else.
• Should we simply say No, playing the national card? If so, others could collapse the process, howling at British selfishness at the hour of Europe’s greatest need.
• Or should we say Maybe, ceding a really important national principle and opening up the way to subsequent salami slicing aimed at increasing our already generous share of the pot?

Thus the familiar pseudo-haggling, bluffing, hypocrisy and game-playing started.

The European Commission quickly threw into the ring their proposal: an Outlandish Increase in the EU Budget. It did not sound much – an increase of the Budget to 1.26% of the newly enlarged Union’s Gross National (sic) Income.

The UK opened its bidding at 1.00% of EU GNI. The difference? Some 200 billion Euros.

The Commission, bent on Much More Europe, knew very well that their bid was absurd and doomed to fail. But, hey, aim for the stars and you might hit the moon. Plus the more extravagant the opening bid, the easier it would be to present the Givers as being selfish and ‘un-European’.

This facile ploy worked as expected.

The Givers laughed heartily at Commission temerity.

The Getters, especially the new member states and Poland in particular, seized on this Commission figure as some sort of new entitlement, to the point of complaining bitterly (or to be precise pretending to complain bitterly) that UK/Giver positions represented a massive cut in ‘their’ money for which they had to be ‘compensated’ in other ways.

And so we come at last to the heart of the issue.

It would have been possible to give Poland most of what it wanted even under the much less ambitious UK/Giver offer, if the Givers themselves took less money from the EU Budget in 2007-2013, primarily through reduced CAP payments.

But France, humiliated by its referendum result, of course would not accept that.

So we in London faced a hard choice.

Should we refuse to accept French and other Giver intransigence and risk letting the EU Budget not be agreed in our Presidency, having fun blaming the French but adding even more stress to an EU already in real disarray?

Or should we accept that, to get what we wanted (ie a final Budget much closer to 1.00% than to 1.26%) French intransigence was an Immovable Object, and instead juggle the sums to offer the new member states a lot less than they reasonably had hoped for but still a goodly whack?

To be continued …

Being a speech-writer for a leading politician is not an easy job.

I did it for two years, as the FCO official speech-writer for then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe.

Sir Geoffrey set a high standard. He insisted on his texts offering the maximum amount of meaning and unrelenting logic condensed down into as few words as possible. He was always on the look-out for pointing up what he called 'paradoxes' - areas of life and philosophy where we all wanted to have our cake and eat it.

All that was fine; impossible to imagine better writing training discipline than working to and fro over important draft texts to get them Just Right.

But there was one frustration. A speech-writer wants to see his/her brilliant words getting wide coverage. Alas for me, Sir Geoffrey was the far opposite of a contemporary political spinner. Rather than get something which was 98% fine out to the media in summary form, he would want to tweak the language just one more time himself to get it perfect.

So deadlines and headlines were missed. And plenty of my (and his) more vivid, memorable lines went down well enough on the day but otherwise evaporated.

We did do well with a major speech on Food Policy in April 1986, an attempt to summarise in a light but significant way some of the policy dilemmas arising from food subsidy programmes in different parts of the world.

Working on this production I mulled over the bizarre fact that at the time (mid-1980s) we in the West were spending huge sums in the 'arms race' with the Soviet Union, while simultaneously subsidising the Soviet Union's ability to produce weapons through cheap EU farm exports of 'surplus' food produced by the CAP.

I came up with a phrase to address this folly which sounded rather snappy, even if it did not mean much: the Diet of Detente.

Sir Geoffrey did not like it: "But what does it mean?" I said that it meant nothing in particular, but it could make a good sound-bite and catch popular attention. In successive drafts he kept deleting it, I kept slipping it back in.

Finally it survived, and of course was picked up by the papers the following day - this was one speech which made it to the media for their deadlines and went down well.

Similar to-ing and fro-ing goes on with all speech-writers. One of the greatest speeches of our times was delivered by Ronald Reagan in June 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate beside the Berlin Wall: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

And here is where it came from, a supreme yet moving moment of moral and political leadership, surviving the attempts by different US bureacracies to strike it from the text for being ... naive, clumsy and provocative.

Sir Geoffrey Howe's most famous speech of course was his resignation statement in the House of Commons in November 1990. It helped bring down Margaret Thatcher. 

His own work. Don't blame me.

This AP story about a robotic street-patroller catches the eye.

It took a while to invent one. But they were anticipated by Ray Bradbury back in 1951...

The goings-on in Canada over free (or is it free?) speech and the activities of Human Rights Commissions seem complicated to outsiders.

So it is helpful to have the whole sorry business explained once and for all.

But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor.

Who else but P J O'Rourke landing the hard way on the Big Stick?

Reader Robbie has sent in a pertinent comment on my post about Objectives, Targets:

Not sure I agree with you on the wider point about targets ... Given the size and complexity of modern public service delivery, no Minister can reasonably be expected to have a strong sense of what is happening in all of their department, all of the time.

Therefore they need to identify priorities that need to be achieved for the benefit of the public, and by which the success of that Minister can be measured.

Once a priority has been identified, an outcome must be set (for without an idea of what the achieved outcome should be, the priority is meaningless). And once an outcome has been set, the department must set out how it will achieve that outcome. Progress towards that outcome is made in steps, which can only be measured by...targets.

It seems to me that if ministers don't set targets, how can they be responsible for what their departments achieve (or fail to achieve)? And if ministers aren't responsible for the success or failure of their departments, we have government by bureaucrat - unelected and unaccountable.

Value for Money: Government in a modern developed nation these days is a massive enterprise, which uses up lots of money. Unlike other organisations, it has the ability to decide how much money it needs; and can then (with relative ease) get that revenue (through tax hikes). Given that power, a responsible government must be able to prove it is spending its money in a way that gives value for money. How else can it do that except by showing progress against objectives?

Phew. Where to start?

No-one says that Governments should simply do what they damn well please with our money, even if often they do. So wanting to achieve specific things as promised in election campaigns is good.

My point is that the sprawling bureaucracy in the UK now associated with doing what Robbie proposes is choking intelligent government and public process. Much of it is in fact hilariously incoherent or even utterly stupid, or at the very best 'merely' distorting and wasteful.

And it is gnawing away at some of our most precious assets.

If we Brits have one global comparative advantage it is the English language, an amazingly clever, unrivalled tool for precision and clarity in communication in a new global era when Communication is Everything.

What else needs to be said for eg English in our schools other than "Pupils leaving school at 16 are expected to have read at least 50 of the 300 key books in Annex A and at least two Shakespeare plays. Marks will be deducted severely for poor spelling and grammar."? Then let schools just get on with it.

What do we actually get?

In effect the state for decades has nationalised most of the means of production of the English language, and as with all nationalised industries brought in clueless incentive structures and messed things up.

Each successive blunder leads to bad outcomes which in turn force civil servants to invent ever more elaborate schemes to try to solve the problem, which in turn make the problems worse.

The setting of Targets as opposed to Standards has led to teachers wasting massive time filling in forms while dwelling more on narrow exam outcomes and less on actual education.

Plus we see a stunning officially driven dumbing down in basic literacy, which now shows itself in almost every communication one receives.

Basically, Serbian and Polish children are learning good English to higher standards than ours are.

How bad is this?

I was lost for words a few years ago when an FCO fast-stream young officer and English graduate from Oxford University served me up a draft with the word 'sebatical' in it. What absence of education and basic reading and grasp of the way English works had produced that level of ignorance after some fifteen years in the better parts of the UK education system?

We now see the phenomenon of officials so gormless that not only can they not spell properly, they also do not grasp that there is a Spell-Checker on their computer or are unable to choose which of the options offered is the right one.

Another relatively new but growing official disease is Risk Management.

Embassies have to complete every few months a spreadsheet which lays out 'risks' to policy and the accomplishment of our Objectives.

The first demand for one of these arrived in Warsaw, attaching the Asia Directorate's model as a splendid example. I crossly sent back an email saying that maybe, after everything which had happened in the Asia region not that long ago, a risk assessment which omitted the word tsunami might be thought to be a little ... ridiculous? I predicted that in a few years' time these banal exercises like so many others would have collapsed under the weight of their manifold contradictions.

I was told off for being 'unhelpful'.

My answer, Robbie, is that there is no theoretical or operational basis for treating such time-consuming exercises within the current Objectives/Targets/priorities industry as being in any meaningful way meaningful. 

Any honest risk analysis for any Embassy would put at the top of its list:

• good chance that a domestic political drama will take Ministers' eyes off the ball here and/or divert resources from our problems to other problems, probably for reasons driven by internal Party focus groups or Spin or Ministers' own election prospects (a couple are in marginal seats with truculent ethnic minority communities)
• non-trivial risk of Iran attacking Israel or vice versa, prompting vast global instability affecting for the worse everything we do

But if any Embassy in Europe wrote that, they would be told off for being unhelpful.

My recommendation to FCO staff?

Act! Boldly!

Seize all FCO/HMG papers you can find with the words Targets/Priorities/Risk Assessments/Strategies/Survey/Outcomes/Outputs/Road-maps on them.

Pile them in the centre of the FCO Main Courtyard. 

Park the new Ministerial fleet of Ford Focuses a good way back for Health and Safety reasons.

Set fire to the paper mountain, dancing and cheering around the shooting flames. (Note: a tiny blow to FCO recycling policy and Global Warming, but hey, No Gain without Pain.)

March en masse to the Foreign Secretary's office. Insist that he sign new FCO Basic Policy Guidelines:

• Work flat out to stop the EU passing new Directives which harm British interests
• Ditto to stop the UN sucking up to dictators and extremists
• If necessary, threaten to stop paying for such nonsense, and mean it - Ministers will support you
• Keep a close eye on the Russians, who play hard and tricky.
• Ditto the French (less hard, even more tricky)
• In fact keep a close eye on foreigners in general - they are often up to something tricky and/or hard
• Climate Change needs attention, but don't put all our eggs in one basket - the science keeps changing faster than the climate
• End all 'development assistance' programmes - they waste money and encourage idleness/corruption
• Never appear Weak
• Be as helpful as you can to all UK business people who show up.
• Ditto to Brits who have got into trouble
• Don't waste public money or cheat on your expenses - Big Trouble if you do
• Now just get on with it

Then just get on with it.

And see if five years' time anything is really that much different/worse.

Back in 1998 in Sarajevo I gave a speech to The Congress of Bosniac Intellectuals.

In it I talked about the role of 'ethnic' political parties and identity politics, praising the thoughtful words of Bosnian writer Ivan Lovrenovic:

He said that the first step in renewing Bosnia and Herzegovina was the "relativisation" of political and national identities: "if we in Bosnia are only Bosniac Muslims, only Serbs, only Croats then we have nothing more to talk about...if you want Bosnia you have to be a Bosnian, and if you want to be a Bosnian you can not be 'only a Bosniac, only a Croat, only a Serb...I am not less a Croat because I am not only a Croat. If all Bosnians from all national identities can say the same for himself we are right on the road towards rebuilding Bosnia and Herzegovina".

Fine words. What do they mean for politics?

First, they rule out ethnically exclusivist political parties and philosophies. Under the BH Constitution - under your law - all discrimination on ethnic or other grounds is illegal. So what is a Serb or Croat or Bosniac political party fighting for?

Any party organizing itself or campaigning directly or indirectly on an ethnic ticket aims to practise discrimination. "Vote for me not because my policies for everyone are good but because I’m a Serb (or a Croat, or a Bosniac). If I achieve power trust me to look after the ethnic interests of my people first and foremost."

Of course our own very nomenclature reinforces one or other stereotype in such cases. Thus from the start of the Bosnia drama (as still now) we have talked about the 'Bosnian Serbs' and 'Bosnian Croats' - not the 'Serbian/Croatian Bosnians'. Somehow the ultimate identity emphasis is put by us - as indeed by them - on their Serbness or Croatness, not their Bosnian-ness.

This of course suits those who say that there can never be a meaningful shared non-ethnic Bosnian identity anyway, hence the whole Bosnia and Herzegovina project as supported by the US/EU is doomed to fail.

The Bosniacs'/Bosnian Muslims' must take a view on these questions. President Izetbegovic once told me that after what had happened in Bosnia there could be no 'ethnic disarmament' for 50 years.

Quite why it should happen then after five decades of the different communities firmly emphasising their distinctness was not clear to me. The Yugoslav regime did a pretty determined job in pushing the idea of 'brotherhood and unity' for nearly 50 years, and look what happened then.

Meanwhile in the USA the debate rages in a different form. Are more women inclining to support Hillary because she is a woman? Are more 'blacks' inclining to Obama because he is (sort of) black? And if so are they the real racists? Read the heated exchanges until you come to the thoughtful intervention of JT234 and then the witty T Gracchus.

And then read Mark Steyn:

It's the identity-uber-alles blocs that prevent the black guy from finishing off the feminist or vice-versa. As the Bee Gees so shrewdly observed:

Whether you're a mother
Or whether you're a brother
You're Staying Alive... 

If you have all the high moral authority of being a terrorist group leader, you have the right - nay, the spiritual duty - to question the integrity of others.

I am baffled.

When I was civil servant I had to account scrupulously for the best part of 28 years for every penny of public money I spent and was responsible for. And I did. My record was spotless.

In fact, when I took up the post of Ambassador in Warsaw I did what no other Ambassador in living memory there had done. I walked round the building doing a full 'surprise check' on the accounts and account processes myself.

This rather stunned the staff at the time. But my peregrinations did reveal various anomalies.

For example, the Embassy workshop every month were given a small 'float' of money to buy basic supplies such as lightbulbs without further authorisation. I called on them and asked them to produce this money and their receipts. The totals did not balance by a penny or two.

I asked why not. It turned out that in some shops there was not always the exact change (ie coins) available for small amounts.

I asked what happened to balance the totals at the end of the month. "Oh, we top up any missing money from the Jar". And there on the window-sill was a large jar full of the Polish equivalent of farthings and groats, used for this very purpose.

I loftily decreed an immediate end to Jar Accounting, and brought in various other procedures to make sure that as far as possible everything was being done (a) honestly and (b) transparently.

Had I abused my entertainment or other expenses or other public funds at any point in my career I would have faced disciplinary action, even prison.

Various things are in play here: long pages of FCO rules and wider public accounting standards. Plus largely unwritten but vital norms of honour and personal responsibility.

But what happens to the credibility of government if the people at the top of a public process which devises such rules themselves do not respect reasonable principles of honour or responsibility or transparency?

This. 

Do they not grasp that they are not spending their own money, but ours? 

Maybe I follow US politics too much. Those who wisely do not might like at least to be aware of one Professor Bill Ayers.

As a younger man Bill Ayers had the full 60s' experience to the point of being an original member of the Weathermen, a group of charmless people dedicated to achieve the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world Communism.

On the way to this noble end they perpetrated various terrorist explosions and robberies; happily some of them ineptly blew themselves up.

The point?

In a majestic cynical attack on candidate Obama, candidate Clinton has pointed up Obama's relationship(s) with Ayers, now (lordy) a professor in Chicago.

This does an elegant job describing Professor Ayers and his views. How did these people manage to be both ultra-cool and diamond hard simultaneously? 

And this does the same in pointing up Hillary Clinton's own slight Weathermen problem.

Still, the Clinton campaign wanted to hit Obama by insinuating that he was soft on terrorism.

And one way or the other it worked.

Update: more, with pictures!